EMOTIONLESS?!

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06 Sep 2010, 3:21 am

As I write this I'm listening to Oliver Sacks on the radio who just said that people with frontal lobe issues or autism may "not be able to experience any emotion in the normal way" (something like that), but can be set free by music.

Did he seriously say that?

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Aimless
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06 Sep 2010, 4:24 am

Well, I disagree with Oliver Sacks, but "normal" is a fuzzy word. It has a culturally loaded meaning but actually just means average. I wonder if he meant it that way. I like Oliver Sacks. I think he has a real compassion for the people he writes about.

R_odin
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06 Sep 2010, 7:40 am

DandelionFireworks wrote:

Well, in my case he's right on the money. Obsessed with music, but not caring for my 3 months old niece. I just don't feel anything when looking at her. And then my father starts making weird noises like his IQ dropped by 50% and i leave, cos i can't stand all the fuss and weird noises. I'm dead inside.

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06 Sep 2010, 8:04 am

It sounds like shorthand on his part—talking in shorthand and smudging it, as J.R.R. Tolkien used to put it. He knows better than that.

Cheers,

TH

Poppycocteau
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06 Sep 2010, 9:00 am

Well, to be fair, he didn't say 'emotionless' - he said 'not be able to experience any emotion in a normal way'. In my case this is absolutely true. I seem to experience emotions very intensely or not at all.

I don't see anything to get annoyed about here.

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KissOfMarmaladeSky
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06 Sep 2010, 10:40 am

Aimless wrote:

I've read an Oliver Sacks book before, and it made me cry. He just writes such sad things, especially in "The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat". The one with the girl who had the tumor and remembered India was especially sad.

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06 Sep 2010, 11:01 am

KissOfMarmaladeSky wrote:

Aimless wrote:

Yes, the cases he speaks of are sad, but I never got the impression that he was callous towards them. He is the person "Awakenings" was based on.

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06 Sep 2010, 12:20 pm

No big deal, he did say "in a normal way" not "not at all". He could have meant expressing emotions in a strange way or feeling them too intensly. It doesn't necessarily mean emotionless.
I like Oliver Sacks, I've read the man who mistook his wife for a hat, it's one of my favourite books.

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06 Sep 2010, 1:34 pm

Oh, and I can experience emotions in a "normal" way, albiet from being overly emotional at times.

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06 Sep 2010, 7:09 pm

Is it possible he was talking about "processing" as opposed to experiencing or feeling? There are some neurologists conducing brain scan studies of Autistics that suggest Autistics may tend to process emotions in parts of the brain other than frontal lobes (where most people process them.) That seems to me to be what he may have been referring to.

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07 Sep 2010, 10:15 am

I am anything but emotionless.

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07 Sep 2010, 1:35 pm

MrXxx wrote:

Yeah, this.

Also, keep in mind that not every person with Asperger's is the same. For example, one symptom of ASD is not being able to detect sarcasm, yet I'm really, really sarcastic and can tell whether or not someone is being serious.

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DandelionFireworks
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07 Sep 2010, 1:40 pm

@Delirium: Gasp! That's impossible! You can't be sarcastic!! My worldview is SHATTERED!! !!

(/sarcasm)

@MrXxx, that's cool. Do you have links?

@The various people who suggest he means not feeling the precise emotions of an NT, then why would feeling something while listening to music be so impressive?

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Douglas_MacNeill
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09 Sep 2010, 2:00 pm

I wonder about the idea of being "emotionless" or having "non-conventional emotional responses." I wonder, because I'm not so sure about myself in this regard.

For example: Each time I hear about that one church in Florida and its plan to observe the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as "International Burn a Koran Day," my body responds by shivering/shuddering. Here's what I don't know about it: would such shivering count as a "real" emotional response (suggesting dislike, fear, revulsion) or would the facct that I have Asperger's syndorme lead to the cocnclusion that my response wasn't really "emotional?"

I wonder if any attempt to respond "emotionally" would place me in a Catch-22: the original Catch-22 of Joseph Heller's novel is the situation where the only actions you can take to suggest that you are insane are willfully construed as evidence of reasonable thinking, which implies that you are not insane.

My "Catch-22", by analogy, would be a situation where any action I take such that I appear to be appropriately "emotional" will be understood by others as a sign that I am "not emotional", that I am "faking it." What then?

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